Character Analysis: Dark Places

What draws the line between a good person and a bad person? In most cases is seems that there is a finely determined division between the morals of the protagonist and the antagonist, but in the book Dark Places the morals get a bit muddled. The novel focuses around the main character, Libby Day, decades after the slaughter of her family. Traditionally the protagonist is a likable, good person, but throughout the story her true morals are revealed. The antagonist of the story is supposed to have a completely poor moral compass, but in the book this is also not the case. The truth is, in the book, none of the characters are good people.
The story starts out with Libby Day, decades after he family is murdered. Her older brother has been in jail

for years after Libby gave a false testament putting him at the crime scene. Years later, she is living in a shabby house in a small town in Kansas doing nothing with her life. She has no job, no friends, no contact with her remaining family members just living off of the money she got after the murders. It isn’t until she gets contacted be a club obsessed with famous murders that she begins to start her life again. Even though Libby never did anything evil, she was never a good person. She lived her life on the pity that she got from other people instead of taking charge. Her morals weren’t bad, but they weren’t good either.
Ben Day, her older brother in prison for the murder of his mother and two sisters, and Diondra, his girlfriend, are the antagonists of the story.

As it turns out, Ben never killed any of his family, but he still wasn’t a good person. At the end of the book you find out what the true cause is of their deaths. While his family was being murdered, Ben sat locked away in a room, too afraid to defend them. On the night of their murders Ben and his girlfriend Diondra were planning to run away before her parents found out about her pregnancy. Ben made a stop at his house to gather up some of his things before they left, but an argument soon broke out between the two of them. They were going to make a clean getaway before they found his younger sister, Michelle listening. Diondra went mad, running into the little girls room and strangling her just to keep their secret safe. She isn’t the one who killed the other two women in the house though. Diondra did have a poor moral compass, always leading her to the wrong decision, but Ben would have been okay. He just didn’t stop her, he didn’t stop any of the events that followed either. He did protect his youngest sister afterwards, when Diondra sent him after her to finish the job, instead of killing her he told her to run and hide. Though he didn’t stop the murder of the rest of his family, he did protect one of

them.
The unforeseen antagonist turned out to be their debt collector. Not until the very end of the novel do you find out that he had, infact, made a deal with the mother, Patty,